The Pop Group: still blazing a trail that makes rock look conservative

More than 30 years ago, the Pop Group ransacked free jazz, dub reggae, noise and funk. But I never imagined they’d still sound so vital in 2010

Like Franz Kafka fronting Funkadelic … Gareth Sager and Mark Stewart perform at Alexandra Palace. Photograph: David Corio/RedfernsI saw the Pop Group just a couple of times back in the day, once in broad daylight at an outdoor festival in east London around about the summer of 1978. I’ve never forgotten that performance. It was the shock of the new writ large.

As far as I can remember, one member was wearing a skirt of some kind, another was sporting a Mohawk haircut. The lead singer sang though a kerchief and, later, though a megaphone. Every song seemed like a statement of wild intent, an unholy noise that merged funk, dub and avant-garde noise.

Back then, the Pop Group were almost too much to take in: pretentious, arrogant, noisy, chaotic, violent to the point of implosive. For me, they signalled the moment that punk mutated into something new and infinitely more ambitious, a chaotic merging of dub, funk, avant-garde noise with paranoid, often politically charged, lyrics. Their music spoke of a future free from the few already exhausted chords that rock’n’roll was built on.

I was reminded of all this on Saturday night at the Garage in north London, when the Pop Group, reformed with all but one of their original members, tore into We Are All Prostitutes, a song that sounds as tumultuous and deranged now as it did 30-odd years ago. I had gone to the gig with mixed feelings. When a beloved group reforms after years of silence, the heart sinks. What price memories if they are trampled on for nostalgic or economic reasons? The original Pop Group burned, and burnt out, in a few years. Now, 30 years on, older, portlier, unable to draw on the untramelled energy and optimism of youth, they were back. Would they still burn?

The answer, against all the odds, is yes. Nick Cave, once described the Pop Group’s music as “unholy, manic, violent, paranoid and painful”. To a great degree, that remains the case. They still sound like nothing before or since. And Gareth Sager still rushes on stage like a gleeful maniac and grabs whatever instrument is to hand – in this case, a keyboard – and unleashes a salvo of atonal noise to set things rolling. Then, a short silence broken by a familiar crash and what Cave once described as one “of the greatest ever openings of a song”; the bestial howl that begins We Are All Prostitutes.

The song rumbles and clatters along in its barely cohesive way, just about grounded by Bruce Smith’s extraordinary drumming and a taut bassline that shakes the floor. I was reminded immediately of Sager’s singular – and often overlooked – brilliance as a rhythmic lead guitarist of fierce intensity, a blur of movement chopping out dissonant shards of sound that punctuate the songs and undercut Mark Stewart’s anguished vocals. “Our children shall rise up against us,” Stewart chants, half-warning, half-hoping, still raging against those Babylonian forces of oppression.

How to describe the sound of the Pop Group? It is, more than anything else, a rhythmic noise, fractious and uneasy, dense and chaotic, but imbued with its own inner logic. It does not welcome you in, but instead provokes a reaction of some kind: fewer people leave the room tonight than used to. The vocals seem to emerge from another space than the music, a deeper, darker, even stranger, realm of the imagination. At times, it’s like Franz Kafka fronting Funkadelic; at others, like a madman with a megaphone ranting at the world over some strange collision of Ornette Coleman and Lee Perry.

Unsurprisingly, things often threaten to fall apart but the sheer propulsion of the rhythm section pulls it all back from the brink. It’s the exhilaration of watching a tightrope walker. The familiar thrust of We Are Time is as close as they get to a riff-based song but it careers off at warp factor 10 within seconds. The bass rumbles like an earthquake, one drumbeat echoes across another, dubbed-up, ghostly. Thief of Fire begins with an even more primal howl than We Are All Prostitutes, then stutters and judders along, frenetic, impatient.

Sonically, things can get strange when there is this much abrasiveness and distortion. You hear noises within noises: strange echoes, floating dismembered vocals, reverberations that seem to emerge from underneath your feet. And then there’s the lyrics. Mark Stewart has a post-Pop Group reputation as one of the great conspiracy theorists of the British music underground, but he is a singular songwriter all the same. She Is Beyond Good and Evil remains utterly unique, utterly spellbinding: an existential love song that posits a Nietzscheian worldview over a dub-funk maelstrom that perfectly echoes the lyric’s fraught articulation of all-consuming desire. Here, love is a unified front against a hostile and threatening world:

“Our only defence is together as an army/ I’ll hold you like a gun.”

No one has written lyrics this strange and startling since the Beats except maybe for the aforementioned Mr Cave when he was rooting though the southern swamplands with the Birthday Party. (An old Gareth Sager quote from 1978: “We are the beatniks of tomorrow”.)

Back in 1979, She Is Beyond Good and Evil, produced by British dub wizard, Dennis Bovell, sounded like the most extraordinarily adventurous pop single I had ever heard. On Saturday night, it blazed anew, the guitar much more upfront in the mix, altering the contours of the song altogether. Stewart told the rock writer Simon Reynolds that the song was “an attempt to mix up poetic, existentialist stuff with political yearnings”. It is all that and more, something truly beautiful and breathtaking in its formal risk-taking.

The Pop Group were young, fearless and full of themselves when I first encountered them, unafraid to be overambitious, even pretentious in order to express their impatience with pop music. They ransacked free jazz, dub reggae, noise, funk and the outer reaches of experimental rock and, for a few brief moments, before the conspiracy theories, the relentless politic ranting and the faux-tribal stylings took over, they blazed a trail that few, if any, have had the imagination or the bravado to follow. It was good to be reminded of how singular and beautifully abrasive the Pop Group could be, and how dreadfully conservative most rock music since sounds in comparison.

In 1979, Bristols’ music scene was riding the crest of the new wave, spawning numerous bands and performers whose influences and indeed physical beings have gone on to feature in some of todays’ big music makers.

During this period local musician Simon Edwards decided to form Bristols’ first independent label, HeartbeatRecords, to capture all the excitement and get Bristols’ music out beyond the M32.

With so many bands to choose from the label set about releasing a series of 7” singles, and such was the demand realised by these that a compilation LP featuring fifteen of these bands was released. The album, topically titled AVON CALLING went on to achieve near legendary status – even hailed by John Peel as “truly superb, the compilation that all others should be judged by”.

Such was the interest in the album that the bands involved continued to supply the label with demo tapes, and the lucky ones went on to release more singles, even 12” EP’s and ultimately LP’s.The sheer volume of demos and the eventual logistical constraints of “just how many records can one man put out in a year” meant that only a few would actually see further releases – though the content was in most cases nothing short of superb.

Label boss Edwards openly admits to continually returning to many of the songs purely to just listen and enjoy some “bloody good music”.Long has it been his ambition to put together an album of these songs – for no other reason but to get them out there where they belong, so they can at last be heard by others and the bands once more be applauded for making such exciting and essential sounds.

Well, the dream has finally been realised and Bristol Archive Records have given him the platform to finally release AVON CALLING 2, a collection of previously unreleased recordings from the vaults ofBristols’ Heartbeat Becords.Featured bands include EUROPEANS, APARTMENT, SNEAK PREVIEW, JOE PUBLIC, 48 HOURS, ESSENTIAL BOP, THE DIRECTORS, THE X-CERTS and SOCIAL SECURITY.

This new album full of forgotten treasures will sit perfectly along side the original AVON CALLING release and go some way to completing the story of just what was happening in Bristol back in 1979/1980 and how the music sounds as relevant today as it did back then.

Tracklisting:

1SOCIAL SECURITYSELF CONFESSION

2EUROPEANSTHE ONLY ONE

3APARTMENTBROKEN GLASS

4PRIVATE DICKSYOU GOT IT

5X – CERTSPEOPLE OF TODAY

6ESSENTIAL BOPAUDITION ROOM

7APARTMENT RETROSPECT

8SNEAK PREVIEWMR MAGOO

9JOE PUBLICLETTERS IN MY DESK

1048 HOURSTRAIN TO BRIGHTON

11DIRECTORSSHOWCASE

12PRIVATE DICKSWANT SOME FUN

13SNEAK PREVIEWI CANT GET OUT

14STEREO MODELSMIDDLE OF NO WHERE

15THE PHONEANY TAKERS

16SEAN RYANSUICIDE MAN

17JOE PUBLIC FASTER

18TVI’SDANCER

19DIRECTORSEMPTY PROMISES

20UNKNOWNYOU MIGHT AS WELL ENJOY YOURSELF

DIGITAL ONLY RELEASES THIS MONTH:

ARC 167ANIMAL MAGIC

Originally released on Recreational Records in 1982

Recorded at Crescent Studios, Bath 11/12 April 1982

Engineered by Steve Street

Remastered by Steve Street April 2010

ARC 170SHARON BENGAMIN

Originally released on Shoc Wave Records in 1980

Drums

Rhythm Guitar

KeyboardsJoshua Moses

Lead GuitarLarry Wilson

SaxNigel Wood

BassGene Walsh

PercussionAll

VocalsSharon Bengamin

Produced by Gene Walsh

Rereleased with the permission of Gene Walsh

Remastered by Steve Street April 2010

ARC 171SHOES FOR INDUSTRY

Originally released in 1980 on Fried Egg Records

Recorded at Sound Conception Studios by Ken Wheeler

Remastered by Steve Street April 2010

ARC 172SHOES FOR INDUSTRY

Originally released in 1979 on Fried Egg Records

Recorded at Sound Conception Studios by Ken Wheeler

Crystal Theatre presents Shoes For Industry

Remastered by Steve Street April 2010

ARC 173BUGGS DURRANT

Originally released in 1983 on Shoc Wave Records

A Side Written by Errol Williamsand Produced by Gene Walsh

B Side Written by Richard Gibbons and Produced by Roger Lomas

Rereleased with the permission of Gene Walsh

Remastered by Steve Street April 2010

ARC 164DAN RATCHETT

Originally released in 1989 on Freshblood Records

A Musi –Tek Production

Remastered by Steve Street April 2010

ARC 165MYSTERY SLANG

1.I’m Mad At You ( J.L Hooker and L Gardez)

2.The Golden Cross ( L Gardez)

3.Seven In A Ditch (L Gardez)

Produced by Stephen Street 1989

Constructive Music . Tristan Music

All instruments played by Mystery –Slang and Stephen Street except:

David Catlin BirchB/A

Simon RobertsHarmonica

Front cover photograph by Neil Davenport

Remastered by Steve Street April 2010

ARC166HERB GARDEN

1.Bulldozer Jones

2.Red Van

3.Convicted Man

4.Sunburn

5.Ice Cream Man

Dave Bass

RatGuitar

Phil Lead Guitar

CarlVocals

BenDrums

All songs written by Herb Garden 1989

Recorded at S.A.M Studios

Engineered by Sooty/Simon Frazer

Sleeve Steve Taylor

Produced by Paul Jocelyn / Herb Garden

PhotoSimon Sherrin

IllustrationNick Hamer

Originally released on Vermin Vinyls

Remastered by Steve Street April 2010

ARC 161ANIMAL MAGIC

1.Grip

2.Go Funky-Doo-Lally

Howard, Mark, Mark, Gill, Rob with Jamie on percussion

All tracks written by Animal Magic 1982

Published by Recreational Music / A.T.V Music Ltd

Originally released on Recreational Records

This was originally a 4 Track 12” two tracks have been excluded due to problems with the transfer. They will appear as a seperate release in the future

All of these tracks would have been recorded between 1978 – 1980.Gimme Direction and Tonight being the last of those recordings during that period (at about the same time as the St. Pauls’s riots).The significance being, that the tracks were recorded at Cave Studios, just off Portland Square, St. Pauls.The band were blissfully unaware of anything going on outside and that close to them

WHATS NEXT?

VARIOUS ARTISTS

The Bristol Reggae Explosion 1978-1983

Released worldwide on 21st February 2011

14 SUPERB TRACKS, 11 NEVER RELEASED BEFORE IN A DIGITAL FORMAT

CD, DIGITAL DOWNLOAD and VINYL

From Pop to Punk, the late seventies and early eighties saw a huge explosion in the number of local bands as more and more people thought they’d give it a go, new studios and independent labels weren’t far behind and Reggae wasn’t going to be left out of the musical mix.

If the majors were even aware of Bristol they showed minimal interest and it was left to the bands themselves and the handful of indie labels to document Bristol’s contribution to what was then a vibrant UK Reggae scene. Working on tight budgets and with no money for marketing campaigns local bands managed to release a small, but steady flow of vinyl, mostly pressed in tiny quantities and often sold direct to fans at gigs, these records, although cherished by those who own them, and sought by those in the know, have been largely ignored by the wider music industry.

Fortunately Bristol music has its own champion in the shape of Bristol Archive Records, a label with a mission to share our great musical heritage with the world, “The Bristol Reggae Explosion 1978-1983” is the first and only attempt to document the local Reggae scene from the late seventies until the early eighties. With the exception of the Black Roots tracks none of the recordings have ever been reissued and all were originally released before CD had been launched, so this is their debut in the digital format.

The music itself reflects the dominance of the Roots style in Bristol, even today Roots is by far the most popular type of Reggae in both the retail and live scenes locally, Black Roots live up to their name and show why they were the equal of any UK Reggae band in their day, Talisman, Restriction and 3D Production follow in their Roots footsteps, but a real highlight of this release is the inclusion of the ultra rare “Africa Is Our land” from Joshua Moses, a UK Roots classic. Bristol wasn’t all about Roots though and the other tracks follow a more mellow template, dealing with love and relationships, both Talisman and Joshua Moses show another side to their music and are joined by tracks from Buggs Durrant, The Radicals and Sharon Bengamin who’s “Mr. Guy” is a classic UK Lover’s track in the mould of Janet Kay, Carroll Thompson, Louisa Marks et al.

“The Bristol Reggae Explosion 1978-1983” will be released as a fourteen track CD, but you can’t have a proper Reggae release without it being on vinyl so there will be a very limited vinyl pressing featuring an eight track selection and just to keep things local the sleeve art is a mid-eighties carnival shot from Bristol’s own Beezer, (www.beezerphotos.com), featuring a classic image of Jah Revelation sound-system.

This release will shine the spotlight on a long neglected corner of the UK Reggae scene and Bristol’s musical heritage, the same music that would help underpin Bristol’s musical dominance in the following decade.

From Pop to Punk, the late seventies and early eighties saw a huge explosion in the number of local bands as more and more people thought they’d give it a go, new studios and independent labels weren’t far behind and Reggae wasn’t going to be left out of the musical mix.

If the majors were even aware of Bristol they showed minimal interest and it was left to the bands themselves and the handful of indie labels to document Bristol’s contribution to what was then a vibrant UK Reggae scene. Working on tight budgets and with no money for marketing campaigns local bands managed to release a small, but steady flow of vinyl, mostly pressed in tiny quantities and often sold direct to fans at gigs, these records, although cherished by those who own them, and sought by those in the know, have been largely ignored by the wider music industry.

Fortunately Bristol music has its own champion in the shape of Bristol Archive Records, a label with a mission to share our great musical heritage with the world, “The Bristol Reggae Explosion 1978-1983” is the first and only attempt to document the local Reggae scene from the late seventies until the early eighties. With the exception of the Black Roots tracks none of the recordings have ever been reissued and all were originally released before CD had been launched, so this is their debut in the digital format.

The music itself reflects the dominance of the Roots style in Bristol, even today Roots is by far the most popular type of Reggae in both the retail and live scenes locally, Black Roots live up to their name and show why they were the equal of any UK Reggae band in their day, Talisman, Restriction and 3D Production follow in their Roots footsteps, but a real highlight of this release is the inclusion of the ultra rare “Africa Is Our land” from Joshua Moses, a UK Roots classic. Bristol wasn’t all about Roots though and the other tracks follow a more mellow template, dealing with love and relationships, both Talisman and Joshua Moses show another side to their music and are joined by tracks from Buggs Durrant, The Radicals and Sharon Bengamin who’s “Mr. Guy” is a classic UK Lover’s track in the mould of Janet Kay, Carroll Thompson, Louisa Marks et al.

“The Bristol Reggae Explosion 1978-1983” will be released as a fourteen track CD, but you can’t have a proper Reggae release without it being on vinyl so there will be a very limited vinyl pressing featuring an eight track selection and just to keep things local the sleeve art is a mid-eighties carnival shot from Bristol’s own Beezer, (www.beezerphotos.com), featuring a classic image of Jah Revelation sound-system.

This release will shine the spotlight on a long neglected corner of the UK Reggae scene and Bristol’s musical heritage, the same music that would help underpin Bristol’s musical dominance in the following decade.

In subtitling this follow-up to the 1978 Avon Calling compilation, documenting a multitude of hopeful Bristol indie bands, Forgotten Gems and Unknown Curios, its archivist Simon Edwards (who put out the original LP on his Heartbeat imprint all those years back), is acknowledging both this collection’s distilled essence of musical ambition and that, while none of these acts have transcended their regional scene, some have totally vanished without trace. What got left behind was a veritable treasure trove of cassette tapes that Edwards has horded and loved ever since.

We don’t care that these bands never got to the Colston Hall, let alone Carnegie: what we like is the notion that someone out there is hearing themselves and their aspirations and dreams for the first time for 30 years due to this diligent tending of the flame. What that must feel like!

As you’d anticipate, there’s a certain amount of raw enthusiasm over genuine talent embedded in these C60 demos, but there’s also some perky three-minute pop recorded for posterity. Were you a member of Sneak Preview, The Phone, Social Security (what a shame Self Confession is so grainy), Directors or Europeans? You did good!

This raid on the vaults of Heartbeat Records captures no-budget Bristol in the fertile years 1978-1980. It’s pretty diverse. Social Security’s ‘Self Confession’ is a minor snot classic celebrating the rock ‘n’dole lifestyle, while Essential Bop’s busily psychedelic ‘Audition Room’ sounds like a Doors album track played at 45 rpm. Sneak Preview’s offerings are wonderfully deranged: ‘Mr Magoo’ meets Andre Breton’s ghost in an afterlife of freak-out organs; ‘I Can’t Get Out’ confronts a predatory transvestite in a fog of dub. Both are surprisingly catchy. Equally fine are the two Apartment tracks-the slasher atmospherics of ‘Broken Glass’ and hurtling panic of ‘Retrospect’. They’re the post-punk heroes you’ve (probably) never heard of. This is alternative history, from which the mysterious Sean Ryan emerges as the Gary Numan that never was.

It’s highly recommended to anyone interested in the early years of the UK underground.